It is well known in the medical community, and in particular, in hospitals, to use an inventory system for dispensing and administering medical items. In this system, medical items provided by a pharmacy, for example, are temporarily stored in a plurality of areas or stations for administration.
The inventory in these locations are commonly and carefully monitored. Monitoring information for each unique inventory commonly includes static levels of inventory below which or above which certain actions, such as an alert or refill, are triggered. These commonly monitored levels include a reorder level, a full level (also known as a par level), and a critical low level (also known as a safety stock level). The reorder level for an item is a value at or below which the item needs to be restocked. The critical low level is a value less than the reorder level but greater than zero (i.e., empty), and signals that the current use of the item is such that its stock may run out (i.e., hit zero) before the next scheduled restock. The critical low level is intended to prevent a stock out (i.e., running out of inventory) by signaling the need to restock inventory between scheduled restocks. Because it is difficult to account for the many variables that affect inventory usage, static critical low levels are often either set too low, resulting in stock outs, or too high, resulting in unnecessarily replenishing inventory.
Furthermore, it is difficult to manually select and/or adjust critical low levels for different types of items, especially in facilities with hundreds or thousands of item types. At such facilities, those with the requisite knowledge to manually select a preferred, subjective inventory level usually do not have the time to set such critical low levels for all the different items. Providing a preset critical low level value applicable to different types of items is also not beneficial, as different types of items are associated with different types of usage patterns. Further, usage patterns may vary over time, so that a pre-set critical low level that was correct at one time may not be appropriate at a later time.